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Justin Timberlake is Not Interested in You Throwing Your Underwear at Him

And other observations from seeing Justin Timberlake live last night.

Photos via Getty Images

Confession: Until this morning, I hadn’t listened to a lick of Justin Timberlake’s newest album. This is not because I’m not a fan, or I’m uninterested in Justin Timblerlake’s music. Instead, it’s that I take Justin Timberlake for granted—his music has always been there, like a book you can read over and over again, its meaning changing as you get older. He has been so talented and so famous for so long, it’s hard to think of him as truly human. So last night, watching him perform at the 2,200 person Hammerstein Ballroom—surely one of the smallest rooms he’s played in his career—it was shocking to see him good-naturedly reveal some humanity.

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If you have never seen Justin Timberlake live, you should, and if you have, you already know how great he is. He’s an entertainer in the truest sense—he sings and dances with the flair of a showman, he plays guitar and piano with ease, and has a full band, the Tennessee Kids, backing him up. He is so talented and his music is so good that he’s basically an angel, a perfect, once-in-a-generation polymath gifted to humanity. He makes every song enthralling, whether you know the words or not, darting around the stage with the agility of a wood nymph, singing with such enthusiasm that you get the sense that there's nothing he'd rather be doing than performing. This is also why Justin Timberlake is sort of terrifying.

In an age of oversharing pop stars whose tabloid narratives play into the public's perception of their music (Robin Thicke, I'm looking at you, buddy), Justin Timberlake is a throwback to an era where our stars did their jobs, did them well, and went home without their fans knowing anything about their lives. This is probably because Timberlake values his privacy, but it creates a certain paradigm, where we can only imagine him in one specific context. He is the perfect entertainer, the Frank Sinatra of our generation: cool, but blandly so; so undeniably skilled at creating something that sounds like the definition of "good music" to as many people as humanly possible. Justin Timberlake is the word "slick" personified, the sonic equivalent of a 34-year-old hitting on mid-level marketing manager in a bar by buying her a shot of Patron on ice without asking whether she wants it or not, while yakking about his new BMW 3-series and letting the light shine just so on his brand-new trilby. He always hits the note and never misses a step—it's like he's so good at music that he emits a palpable sense of imbalance, like he's not equipped to deal with the fullness of the human experience. You get the sense that if he were handed a baby, it would immediately start crying.

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Because of this, the most delightful parts of his excessively delightful performance found him interrupting the simultaneous hysteria and hypnosis his talents had placed the audience under and making things a little loose. He’d punctuate his hits with adlibs for no reason, slipping, “These hoes ain’t loyal!” into the bridge of “What Goes Around” with the enthusiastic melisma of a mid-season American Idol contestant. He’s give rambly, clearly-unrehearsed speeches: about what a good time he and the Tennessee Kids were having, about how he wished he could be smoking weed with the audience, about how the woman who’d thrown her underwear at him wouldn’t be able to get additional MasterCard Priceless Points for her efforts (the event was sponsored by the credit card company as well as American Airlines). Upon several occasions, he invoked the Migos flow, transforming his lyrics into tightly-wound triplicates just because he could. Nearly three-quarters of the way through the show, he stopped his own momentum dead in its tracks, whipping out a guitar and performing Ray Lamontagne’s “Jolene,” which kicks off with the line, “Cocaine flame in my bloodstream,” a risqué move even for a now-33-year-old Timberlake.

Watching Timberlake take to the stage like a kid on a playground reminded me that he’s someone we’ve grown up with. Unlike many, JT has largely managed to avoid the pitfalls that often beset child stars. He never went off the rails, never had a drug freakout, never canceled a tour due to “exhaustion.” And while some might quibble about the quality of his music as he’s aged, it’s impossible to argue that his work hasn’t become more complex and mature as his career's progressed. The worst that’s happened to him is he copped to being a bit of a stoner, he wore a denim suit one time, and he probably should have realized the anti-crack anthem “Losing My Way” was well-intentioned but extremely silly. Besides that, he’s got a pretty clean slate, both musically and personally. More than anything, he's just there. Good enough for everyone to like him, cool enough not to be annoying, but not so cool he might alienate anyone. He will always be there, and much like Justin himself, that's so good it's scary.

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Drew Millard is bringing sexy back to blogging. He's on Twitter - @drewmillard

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